istanbul (not constantinople)

today i am turkeying and gobbling. this is about the tenth turkey i've ever prepared, and it's always a bit of an adventure. i love the whole process, with the possible exception of the stress over whether the bird will be thawed out in time.

i love dicing apples.
i love mincing celery.
i love plumping raisins.
i love watching the stuffing swell.
i love whipping up butter and sage.
i love using my digital meat thermometer.
i love peeling back the tin foil.
i love wearing an apron.
i love eating the final product.
i love remembering all the thanksgivings, christmases, and easters past for which i made turkey, and thinking of the friends who sat around that feast with me!

i still don't know how to carve the turkey or make a gravy i'm really happy with, but... yay! it's turkey day!

i think i'm going to put on "white christmas" while i wrap a couple of gifts and wait to unveil my masterpiece!

i got you, rusch!

i recently got crafty and revamped a rusch clock from ikea. this simple, cheap plastic clock is easy to personalize, as has often been mentioned on ikea hacker.

all you have to do is pop off the clear plastic front-piece, pull off the hands, and decorate your blank canvas: the clock face.

because the clock was for idris, and because we watched "groundhog day" on groundhog day when we'd just been dating for two weeks, this is what i went with:

i actually came across the picture while brainstorming ideas, and it was too perfect for words! all i had to do was print it to size, cut it out, and make sure the numbers corresponded to the appropriate time.

i love how it turned out (and so does idris!), and am planning on making one for myself! that way whenever i check the time i can be reminded to make each day matter.

on telepathy and dumplings

i have a new friend and one of the things we like doing is being psychic.

said i on january 24th: hey, do you have plans not this tuesday but the one after? bonus points if you can figure out why i'm asking.
said he: you're not going to believe this, but i was totally going to suggest watching that movie, too!

so, on february 2nd, i brought over "groundhog day." before we watched the movie, though, we headed out to the grocery store to get what we needed to make pork and leek dumplings. see, he'd hilariously suggested that we cook something with "ground hog." i had amusingly joked that the store would be sold out of minced pork because everyone would be doing the same thing that day.

and it was!

or maybe it just doesn't carry it? anyway, in order to mimic the tasty concoctions of the working class foodies (see video below), we bought plain pork sausages (and de-sausaged them), leeks, green onions, ginger, and wonton wrappers. we combined the meat with soy sauce and the veggies, loaded the goods into the wrappers (carefully but not super neatly!), and then boiled them for 8-10 minutes.



we dipped our delectable little parcels into a vinegar-soy-ginger-green onion sauce. and sighed and self-congratulated and went back for more. and watched bill murray repeat the same day over and over again.



and you know what? it was a day worth repeating.

hodgepodge

as a result of a solar conspiracy of unprecedented proportions, it looked like it was fifteen degrees outside today! it was somehow easier to put up with the crazy wind and the minus five because... well, isn't blue the best colour for a sky? i asks ya!

i submitted a draft of my thesis last night and, though it wasn't everything i'd hoped it would be, i'm reasonably happy with its progress. it'll be super by the end of the month, and i look forward to defending it in march. i even have shoes to wear for the defense! :-D

it's been a while since i've talked about my cooking adventures, and there have been two notable ones: first, i made clementine cookies that pretty much rocked my world. they were based on sydney's lemon sugar cookies and made the entire kitchen smell like satsuma. these will certainly be repeated! the same week, i baked some berry muffins with oatmeal, cherry yogurt, and orange juice in them. while they tasted like a good morning, the blackberries were a little seedy and made some bites a little awkward. i think i'll stick with bluebreeze and raspbreeze in the future.

in other news, i'm seriously considering playing the euphonium once in a while. when no one is at home, bien sur.

finally, do yourself a favour: cook up some minced pork, rent the bill murray classic, and make your groundhog day a special one. i know i will!

solo?

there's an important distinction between a monologue and a soliloquy. the former is an extended uninterrupted speech by one person, while the latter is similar, but not intended to be heard by any of the other characters. it's addressed only to the (passive) audience. it's hamlet's "to be or not to be" rather than, say, emilio's speech about how he ended up in detention in "the breakfast club" (which i just saw!). hamlet was just talking to himself, working through ideas outloud, but the jock was actually communicating. i mean, yes, he was working through stuff, but he also wanted the rest of the crew to know. and he wanted them to respond.

if you're asked to recite a monologue, either kind will do. but when you're writing a blog... you have to kind of decide which kind of "performance" it's going to be. for the record, i don't want this to be a soliloquy.

ok?

"you *have* to be kidding!"

too many mornings, those are the first words out of my mouth. it's been taking me hours to fall asleep at night and forever to wake up in the morning. my dreams have been vivid and occasionally emotionally exhausting, so i often walk through my day like a zombie. the dumb kind of zombie. the kind that thinks cauliflowers are brains. [(c) seth grahame-smith]

last night, as i lay in bed, between playing "6 degrees of separation"* and realizing that i have only two weeks to complete my first draft of my thesis, it was very hard not to wonder what my life will be like a year from now. will i be in toronto? will i be more sure of myself? will i be more disciplined? will i - dare i ask? - be happy?

anyway, i think my cell phone is beginning to resent the abuse. does anyone know a surefire way to convince the body that sleep is for nighttime and alert wakefulness is for daytime?

* for instance: at his audition for "glee," chris colfer sang "mr. cellophane" from "chicago." his character, kurt hummel, also sang that song in the pilot. how can i connect "glee" and "chicago"?

glee - jane lynch - julie and julia - stanley tucci - it could happen to you - nicholas cage - the rock - sean connery - entrapment - catherine zeta-jones chicago

nb: this was before i knew that jane lynch was in talladega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby. this piece of information would have simplified things considerably, since john c. reilly is mr. cellophane himself.

crushed

a little while ago, i wrote about the movie "the reader" and reflected on the limits of our compassion.

"sometimes we find ourselves at the end of our compassion and love. there is only so far any one of us can go, and we are, perhaps, surprised to discover we are at that border. crossing over would be right - so virtuous, so noble, so good - but it is not within our strength. we are at the end of ourselves."

it's not even always the case that you suddenly look up and realize the border lies between you and your next step. sometimes you just slam right into the brick wall that prevents you from giving more. at least i do. at least... i just did.

and it hurts. i want to be someone who can always give more... but maybe you can't achieve that without inevitably giving less. and who wants love that is a hundred miles long but only one inch deep?

a friend of mine recently asked me if there's anything i do halfway. he was referring to my hallowe'en costume (see here), but it gave me pause. when it comes to people i care about, i very rarely go halfway. i screw things up, but it usually has nothing to do with my lack of investment.

i hope... i really do hope that, one of these days, i'm going to bust a me-shaped hole right through that brick wall. but until my heart is strong enough for that, i suppose i'll have to suffer through many more bruised shins and broken noses.

for now, i'm curled up at the foot of the wall, wishing my tears could dissolve it, brick by brick.

"our best hope is to love as fiercely and give as freely as we can - as we can - and learn to forgive ourselves for the rest."

putting my red queen face on

this hallowe'en, inspired by tim burton's new take on alice in wonderland and countless youtube how-to videos, i decided to recreate(ish) the look of the red queen, as played by helena bonham carter.

enjoy the step-by-step!



two hours later, all made-up, i just added a regal costume (all stuff i had in the house) and a red wig. oh, and a crown and a card-deck purse i made myself!



and then i went off to my very important date!

10

this song popped up on my ipod the other day and i was struck by how well it described the way i felt about god, particularly toward the end of those ten years...



these parts especially resonated:

i sang your songs, i danced your dance
i gave your friends all a chance
but putting up with them
wasn't worth never having you*...

well, if i was in your position
i'd put down all my ammunition
i'd wonder why'd it'd taken me so long

but lord knows that i'm not you
and if i was, i wouldn't be so cruel
'cause waitin' on love ain't so easy to do

(*not in a blanket sense. but, yes, this resonates profoundly)

the music video makes me wonder whether i'd like to turn back time. and in many ways, i would. my life would be very different if i hadn't begun attending church in 1997. my career path, my family life, my friendships. but maybe i'm better for having arrived here the way i did. maybe it's ok to go down some painful paths, because otherwise you'd always be wondering about them. plus, i have met some wonderful people and learned some crucial lessons along the way.

in fact, i know i'm more compassionate to those who disagree with me than i used to be. maybe that just comes with growing up and caring less about "winning." or maybe spending ten years thinking a lot about character and integrity and sacrifice and kindness and truth and beauty has been good for my soul. so it's not so much about regret as... cutting my losses.

d. and i are speaking again, which is to say that he's arguing with me again. and i now realize what my sister was talking about when she said, "all christians seem to care about is whether i'm a christian." again, a blanket statement, so not quite accurate. but still... it hints at something real. and silly. and even a little painful.

there are a few things i'm an evangelist for: lars and the real girl, asparagus, chick peas, the west wing, toronto's ravines, and some social justice issues. but i hope i always, always care more about the people i'm talking to than i do about being right.

v e pentru viaţă, care este şi grea şi frumoasă!*

* v is for life, which is both hard and beautiful!

hooker's delight

ever since amy introduced me to puttanesca, this vegetarian and easily vegan pasta dish has been a favourite of mine. recently, two of the food blogs i enjoy have featured it: first, stacey offered her recipe: a combination of olive oil, anchovies, capers, garlic, black olives, and canned tomatoes over linguine or penne. then, not to be outdone, lori lynn posted her tweaks on stacey's take: she adds basil and red chili pepper flakes in the early stage and tops the pasta-and-sauce combo with a scoop of ricotta cheese, rather than parm.

while i'm trying to break out of my bizarre loyalty to original recipes, i really do love that amy's puttanesca also includes green olives, golden raisins, and toasted pine nuts. the bigger issue, however, is the whole anchovy fiasco.

first off, isn't it a little weird that these fishies *dissolve* when you cook them?! secondly, anchovies have a reputation: from sleepover friends to the babysitters club (though apparently kristy liked them!) to friends to the teenage mutant ninja turtles, so much of pop culture has told me they're gross. but, hey, come to think of it, mr. beastly was wrong about brussel sprouts - there *are* ways to make them so super tasty! - so maybe there's room for benefit of the doubt when it comes to wee salty fishes, too.

so, despite all that the strategic brainwashing and my aforementioned devotion to (my) traditions, i'm tentatively confident (is that contradictory?) that adding anchovies will be ok. afterall, as a kid i loved sardines. and there was also some kind of fish paste that we just spread on slices of bread? so this is prolly worth a try. maybe rather than making "lady of the night" pasta for lunch today, i'll wait until i can get to the grocery store and dig up some fishy friends.

do you like anchovies?

[explicit]

for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me yet, my dad really wants an organized catalogue of all the movies they own. being the dutiful daughter he's always dreamed of, i've recently spent a whooole lot of time working on that. data-entry can be mindnumbing, but my boundless love for lists and categories has trumped all that.

on the other hand, definitions have been nagging at me. see, if the point is to make movie retrieval more straightforward, the system (i.e. um, me) needs to make good guesses about genre. but genres aren't always intuitive... and certainly they're not objective. case in point: the american president - drama or comedy? (it turns out aaron sorkin himself doesn't think in those categories.) what makes a movie "romantic?" what qualifies as "action?"

oh, and what is a mystery?

tell me a story...

i love to hear. to close my eyes and imagine the people and crises and triumphs you describe. they needn't be new stories. i dream that reading won't always be a solitary enterprise. maybe that's why i so long to one day have children: they will make a storyteller of me. it's been a long time now since i realized that i could never marry a man who wouldn't read to me at night... or whisper bedtime stories in my ear in the dark stillness.

perhaps that is why the reader has completely overwhelmed me. surely it is not the only reason... but i feel i'm almost drowning in it all.

standing at a distance, from my comfortable seat, my heart shouted it out, plead with him: "you know what you must do! you know what is at stake! put yourself aside!"

but knowing right from wrong is rarely the difficulty: ethics can never grip us, mobilize us, paralyze us, so much as our fears and hurts do.

there is a moment in this movie when one touch, one smile, one infinitesimal drop of kindness might have made a tremendous difference. but it was withheld. because it was impossible. sometimes we find ourselves at the end of our compassion and love. there is only so far any one of us can go, and we are, perhaps, surprised to discover we are at that border. crossing over would be right - so virtuous, so noble, so good - but it is not within our strength. we are at the end of ourselves.

there is pain that goodwill cannot erase. our best hope is to love as fiercely and give as freely as we can - as we can - and learn to forgive ourselves for the rest.

wish list (under construction)

with 33 days left until i go back to school, i'm composing a holiday wish list... any recommendations?

- prepare a turkey dinner (and find people to feed it to... volunteers?)
- spend an evening playing hoopla, drinking egg nog, and listening to carols. while wearing sweaters. it's a tommy hilfiger ad! [(c) aaron sorkin]
- invest some time in the archives at uoft/york/conrad grebel
- look for a job
- make a snow fort
- work on scrapbooks with mike and kevin
- set up the tree with mom and dad
- read "alias grace"
- see "rachel getting married" and all the other movies i've been missing out on because i live in hamilton
- eat sushi at least once a week (x5)
- draught-proof my apartment
- pad my agatha christie collection
- read two of the textbooks for my "women in xn history" class
- knit or crochet something. (seriously, it just feels wrong not to.)
- finally check out all the music paul has ever recommended to me

secret irony

last sunday's postsecret batch included a picture that has circulated online for some time. it was a photoshopped depiction of what a particularly disgusting ailment might look like and was viscerally, knee-jerk yucky. the secret was something like, "even though i know this isn't real, it still haunts me."

i mentioned some of my reaction here, but i wanted to add this: most of the online debate (at least 120 pages' worth as of tuesday) revolved around a) whether the picture was offensive and b) whether removing it constituted censorship. let's deal with those, for just a minute.

a) corina is very much affected by pictures of dry, cracked soil, maps that emphasize topography, and that scene in splash when daryl hannah's legs turn back into her mer-tail. she just is. i don't have to understand why something upsets her, or be upset by it myself, in order to care enough to protect her from it. so, i warn her when especially gross scenes are coming up on episodes of house. the ridiculous online argument about whether this picture was offensive is a waste of time. people are not offended by the secret or plotting to track down whoever sent it in... they're just viscerally upset by the image. given that little good can come from the picture's presence (see my previous post), why continue upsetting them? to what end?

b) ok, but would removing it be "wrong"? no. frank, the aptly-named founder and moderator of postsecret, picks and chooses what he puts online. from the hundreds of postcards he receives each week, one or two dozen make it to the blog. more make it into his books, but the process nevertheless involves selectivity, the criteria for which are entirely frank's prerogative. hence, the censorship issue is moot.

(actually, this whole debate is moot, because the secrets are new this week, as always. regardless...)

one final note: some people expressed concern that whoever sent the postcard would be hurt by having it removed. i somehow doubt that. part of the goal of the project is to remind us how connected we are. how, even in our darkest secrets, we are not alone. like countless others, this secret resonated with many of us. ironically, by removing the secret, we would have been standing in solidarity with the secret-sharer. we would have been saying, "hey, it haunts us, too. let's stop looking."

regarding caspian

today i joined the mounds of lewis fans who crowded theatres to consume this summer's ration of narnia chronicles. i wanted to write out a few of my reflections, both positive and negative. if you've seen it, please weigh in!

bad news first... my top 10 issues:
10) romance between susan and caspian. just no. ok?
9) no real "repentance" scene for susan and peter, which was internally consistent (see 5, below) but sad. i love aslan in that scene.
8) competitive tension between peter and caspian. this was explicitly not the case in the book: peter assured the telmarine heir that the pevensies were just there to help, and that he had no ambitions to the throne.
7) along the same lines, an uber-ambitious, vengeful caspian. who is this guy? in the book he never imagined launching an attack on miraz until the centaur called for it. he wasn't enough of a kid here.
6) two words: mexican standoff. oh, four more and some punctuation: are you kidding me?!?!?!!?
5) the decision not to follow lucy's vision of aslan was treated very lightly, which was quite disappointing. this was a crisis in the book, almost a crucible for the pevensies.
4) the ecological bent of lewis' work was tragically underplayed. all but gone gone was the telmarine fear of trees and water, which was to be contrasted with the narnian way. there was some depiction of telmarine industry, but this wasn't enough for me.
3) dropping this line: "you come from lord adam and lady eve, and that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. be content.”
2) dropping this line: "wouldn't it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men so that you’d never know which were which?"
1) not enough cuddling with aslan. i'm not kidding.

nice changes:
- including the white witch. i'm more than ok with it, 'cause it revealed important things. and because ed was the one to deal with it, and that seemed to heal up some issues from lw&w
- "for narnia" vs. "for aslan" - sweet and very much in keeping with lewis' themes. i like it very, very much.

ambivalence:
- the battle at the telmarine castle. just not sure how i feel about that change.

criage:
- war freaking tears me up right now. when the gate came down after that battle? i cried and cried. just bad. there's prolly another note coming about that.

learning to call it "good"

two years ago, i watched lord of the flies on this weekend and remembered how much we need God. maybe this year it'll be the believer.

"when you're ready, you may come forward for communion." hmm... on the one hand, how can i ever be ready? on the other hand, how can i delay?

run, don't walk

steve and i saw this last night.
then i went home and read the book again.
and i don't want to get over it.
some times there are great seasons to cry. :)

p.s. it was also clean monday yesterday, which was harder on my heart than i expected. wilderness can only ever be embraced if there's real hope of something better on the other side. so, here's hoping.

as for the terrors ahead - for he did not fool himself that they were all behind him - well, you just have to stand up to your fear and not let it squeeze you white. right, leslie? right.

double back

i finished watching back to the future iii this morning (yay stay-at-home-church!) and was truly moved by this one thing doc brown says: ...your future hasn't been written yet. no one's has. your future is whatever you make it. so make it a good one, both of you.

sigh.

then i went upstairs and, right there on the weather network, none other than david suzuki was talking about how the future isn't predetermined, and how our actions today will shape tomorrow. he was probably talking about global warming, but i was still stuck on doc brown.

never confuse a gift with a given.

problem solved

you will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. the paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. on the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. so that love contains in it the contradiction: the attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.
~ professor levy in "crimes and misdemeanors"